four-legged animal). By requesting a definition, the speller identifies which word must be spelled. There is also another factor which knowing the definition may unlock. The definition may help identify the origin of the word. Roughly 70% of English words appeared first in another language. Pairing this knowledge with the next allowed question can help spellers enormously.
3. May I have the language of origin, please? About 30% of all English words come from Latin. Concentrating first on learning Latin roots, prefixes and suffixes gives a great deal of insight into how words are spelled. The next most important language of origin to explore is Greek. Many of the words used in science and philosophy come to us from Greek. After these two huge contributors to the English language come French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, Persian, and Sankrit, in rapidly declining levels of adoption.
When a word is adopted from another language, its spelling is done according to rules which allow our alphabet to represent the sounds in the other language. The process is transliteration. Knowing where the word came from helps the speller know which rules were used in the transliteration process. Of course, the speller must know what those rules are, but the fact that there are rules to apply, gives the speller a better chance of spelling the word correctly. Put that together with the definition and a speller can be pretty confident they are on the right track. For example, knowing the word pneumonia was originally Greek and is a disease of the lungs provides the speller with important clues to the correct spelling. Words from Greek are most likely